A team led by two top engineers is trying to make Hyperloop a reality though the crowdfunding website JumpStartFund.

After Elon Musk finally revealed his plans for the Hyperloop ultra-high-speed transportation system on August 12, the billionaire entrepreneur released his proposal out in the world, open-source, hoping someone would pick up the idea and run with it. Well, now someone has.

Marco Villa, formerly the director of mission operations for Musk's SpaceX company, and Patricia Galloway, formerly the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, have emerged as the leaders of an effort to actually finance and build Hyperloop, which, in Musk's vision, would be able to carry passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles at speeds in excess of 700 miles per hour.

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Villa and Galloway lead a group that has appeared on JumpStartFund, a crowdsourcing website somewhat like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but fundamentally different in an important way: JumpStartFund allows groups to form corporations to back the ideas they love. This allows the site to trade in massive proposals that would be far too pricey for typical crowdsourcing sites. Hyperloop, for instance, would cost only $6 billion, according to Musk, and big infrastructure projects tend to get more expensive as they go, not less.

A statement from JumpStartFund says that a proposal to realize Hyperloop appeared on the site shortly after Musk's official announcement. It was subject to nearly a month of vetting by the site's users because it became and approved project. Villa and Galloway aren't out canvassing for donations yet; for now they're trying to gather top people to work on the project in exchange for equity in the new corporation.

We won't know for a while whether the power of the crowd can bring such a monumental endeavor to fruition. It's nice to see somebody try, though. Musk, while hinting that he might build a demonstration prototype of Hyperloop, has declined to commit his own limited time to actually building the thing. In a statement, Villa reaffirmed what a lot of engineers said upon Musk's big reveal—there's no technical reason Hyperloop couldn't work. Money and politics are what stand in the project's way, and this new team will have to navigate that minefield if Hyperloop is to become more than a dream on paper.